Friday, August 30, 2013

Fuck the banks and fuck Laurentian Bank in particular

The Chihuahua of Justice shits upon you Laurentian Bank!

I remember twenty years ago opening a chequing account at a local credit
union in Portland and what great service I got. Not just from the
individuals who worked there, who were excellent, but also from the
generally reasonable policies of the institution.

Today it is
just all about scraping the poor and middle class for everything they
can while treating their customers like total shit the entire time. Record-making
profits year in and year out for the Canadian banks, but if you bounce a
cheque you have to pay them $47. FORTY-SEVEN DOLLARS!!! That's like
someone's food for a week. When you ask them about it, they go on and
on about all the work they have to go through and how much it costs them to "process" the bounced cheque. We all know it's horseshit. The same "processing" time it takes them to put the actual money in your account when you deposit a cheque. Meanwhile, they are scouring free interest off that deposit, while you don't see any of it.

I
had to open a new account recently and it has been nothing but pain and
bureaucracy every step of the way. The stupidest policy after the
stupidest policy and sheep-like employees who have no power to make any
decisions. Their excuse now is new federal security laws. Just one
more way that this bullshit war on terrorism screws the people over. We didn't even want to open a new account, just simply take one person's name off and add mine instead. But oh no supposedly that is no longer allowed. It has to do with people hiding money or something. Um, is the bank not capable of maintaining a record of all the names on an account?

Even more maddening is how Laurentian Bank has clearly recently hired some PR company to do a big rebranding. So you get these fake friendly sentences in handwriting font scrawled all over their ATM machines. With the account, I got this huge book with chapers (in the same font) entitled "Take hold", "Seize the day" and the best "operate freely". Yeah, those are the things I am trying to do except for I have to spend a fucking day and a half of my life just to open an account with you.

All
I wanted to do today (after the weeks it took us to even get this
account opened), was to get internet access to my account. For some reason, they are
not capable of just giving it to you when you open your account. You
have to phone them (a teeny hell in and of itself since there is no
option for internet access in their phone tree). And guess what? I got
negged on my security question. I found this out after waiting on hold
for 10 minutes. Somebody wrote my birthday down wrong and now I have
to go back to the bank (with two pieces of ID) to fix that, then phone
them again.

And guess what, their website is going to suck. I've already had the pain of dealing with 2 different Canadian banks websites and they are embarassingly bad. National Bank is clunky, looking like it was made in 1997, but it is more or less straightforward at least. Desjardins, that acts like it is the pride and joy of Quebec, is just a joke, a total mess where it is impossible to do anything.

All the banks suck, that is for sure. But so far Banque Laurentide has been the worst. Don't go there.

So fucking outraged right now. You fuckers in the boardroom owe the people of Canada some answers.

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I had the exact same thing happen--some idiot at the bank wrote down my husband name wrong and sure enough I have to close the whole account down. Not to mention they put a hold on a cheque 2 months after they released the funds to me...They suck stay way from Laurentian Bank

Went with ING Thrive two years ago and have been happy ever since. Banking wise, at least. Free, unlimited transactions, free grace period for cheques that would bounce, email alerts for everything and interest on my checking account.

Why briques du neige?

When I first moved to Montréal, I was obsessed with the quantity of accumulated snow in the winter. I came up with a scheme to design a snow-brick making tool and hire out my services to people where I would turn all the snow in their yard to bricks and then stack it neatly. This enterprise, named briques du neige, would also be an excellent way to learn about and integrate myself into my new community. Unfortunately, before I was able to launch my plan, the Japanese invented Yuki-Taro and made me redundant. So my project morphed itself into this blog, kept the title (including the minor grammatical error which perfectly captures my functional but erroneous french) and the mission to better understand this crazy city and the Quebec culture that is such a crucial and complex part of the Canadian story.

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About Me

1/3 American, 1/3 Canadian, 1/3 Montrealer, when I'm not working for the planet and living my lucky life, I hang out on the internet and write about culture and language in Montreal, books and movies. I also rant on a wide range of subjects and try to do that here so my wife doesn't have to be the only one to suffer.